Johnny Carson's 3,300 Hours Digitalised for Licensing

17 August 2010

JOHNNY CARSON'S 3,300 HOURS DIGITIZED FOR LICENSING

During his 30 years on NBC as host of The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson interviewed more than 22,000 guests ... and now all 3,300 hours of the shows have been copied from the three original recording formats to digital files to aid clips licensing. The show, which ran from 1962 through 1992, was the forerunner of to-day's US tv talk shows. Until 1999, the archive was stored in a salt mine in Kansas. Last year, the plan to migrate the footage to a digital format was activated. Now clips can be identified and played on-line via contextual metadata in a database where full program transcripts are linked to video for clip browsing and licensing. Web: www.johnnycarson.com